Hello, my name is Luis Arizaga and I'm going to talk a little about how I created "LeChuck the Zombie Pirate".

Concept & References

This image was inspired by illustrations created for graphic adventures; in particular I was influenced by the cover of "Monkey Island 2" the videogame, designed by Steve Purcell.

Modeling

The entire modelling process was done in 3d Studio Max (Fig.01); the UVs and the rig were done with the same program, Mental Ray for rendering.

Fig. 01

Texturing

Texturing was a very important part of this work, both for the character as well as for the scenery. I basically used Photoshop and ZBrush to texture the pants and the boots, using the polypaint tools. The 3DTotal Textures library was very useful for texturing the pirate since it has a large variety of textures classified by topics, in very good resolutions. It's always easier to do these projects when you have access to such good sources.

I'm going to show you some images now which illustrate how the texture library facilitated my work in the key textures of the character and the scenery, with its different objects. First of all, I used a texture base, and then applied other layers of different textures, overlapping in various ways and at different opacity values. To achieve the final results I also deleted or cloned parts of each layer, depending on what I needed.

Here I will show you - in images - how I textured the parts of the main character:

The Hat:
The material parameters can be seen in Fig.02.

To create the textures I used the Clone Stamp and Eraser tools to modify the textures I Photoshop to achieve the desired effects (Fig.02a). Note: The fringes of the hat and the jacket were mapped with a tileable texture of rope, which was created from a 3D model.

Fig. 02

Fig. 02a

Face & Hand Skin:
The material can be seen in Fig.03.
The composition of the textures for the material maps can be seen in Fig.03a.